Minute/Year is an automated, multi-year, sound-based durational installation artwork, currently installed in the stairwell at Lely in Amsterdam.
On Sunday, 15. May 2022, there will be an ‘open minute’ event at Lely. During this event, attendees will be able to directly experience — and contribute to — the sounds and images that this ongoing automated work generates.
- Date: Sunday, 15. May 2022
- Time: 8:00–9:00pm
- Location: In the stairwell, Lely, Amsterdam
- Entry: Free
If you’re interested, please come by at 8pm. The recording will happen at exactly 8:22pm. Beforehand, we will give a small introduction to the work and what it means to experience it live. Afterwards, we will invite visitors to share their impressions of the work, to listen back to the traces that we will have created, and to have a drink and a chat.
Minute/Year — a quick overview
Minute/Year is an automated, sound-based durational installation.
Every day, for one minute, Minute/Year adds a new layer: the sound that is occurring in the stairwell at Lely, during a single minute’s time every evening at 20:22, is recorded. But, simultaneously, the previous day’s recording — of the sound of the same space, 24 hours before — is played back into the space, through speakers mounted on the wall. So, each recording includes its predecessor, which includes its predecessor in turn, and so on, in a potentially infinite regression. Each day’s minute-long recording is then converted into a spectrogram — an image of the frequencies of the audio — and the two parts are then published online.
This entire process is automated, and runs daily at 20:22 (in 2022). Through this daily three-step process, the sounds of daily life — of human activities, large and small — become material for a layered index, which develops, mutates and degrades over time, a kind of repeating surveillance turned inside-out. Minute/Year is partly an online archive, partly an accumulating layering process, and partly a multi-year durational sound installation.
Minute/Year began on January 1st, 2016, and has generated compelling sounds and images for one minute each day ever since, in an accumulating, serial process. For the entirety of 2022 — beginning on January 1st, and continuing until December 31st — it is installed in Lely, for its seventh annual iteration. Over the preceding years, it has altered location each year. It has no set ending date.
The daily archive of traces created by Minute/Year is available online, and can be followed on Twitter, Vimeo, or Telegram. The recordings are also available as a weekly podcast (via RSS, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts). A full overview of the work is available here, and the archive of all recordings to date is online here.